Utah Books

Dr. Peterson has done a brilliant job of writing and teaching in this work. This book is a must for anyone interested in Mormon, Utah, Western or U.S. history. You will see Utah and the Mormon Church in a whole new light. Dr. Peterson is magnificant in his research, historical honesty, writing method and using original sources. this is a book I treasure. Thank you Dr. Peterson

A fascinating read, especially for people with ties to Utah and for members of the LDS Church. How unfortunate that this story has remained largely untold until now. There were sections that could have used more solid references. I am a direct descendant of James Andrus who is mentioned several times in the book, and some of what was written in this volume contradicts some fairly well-documented family history, but overall this book is wonderfully presented. This is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of the American West.

Read these terse tales from the finest polygamous wives one valley begs to offer, and you may just stack your deck and head for Sandy (UT). So many ways to lose your shorts; well, ten! Which is plenty. I oughtta know--no, you oughtta!

These stories aren't all about or by Mormons and are even less about polygamists. They are an excellent collection of modern women's fiction with the unifying geographic theme of the desert. Anyone who has loved remote, rugged country--the kind of land that men like to think they have conquered and tamed--will appreciate the cutting beauty of these stories. And anyone who has met those men who think they've conquered and tamed anything will appreciate the humor & pain contained here.

A biography of one of the pioneers of commercial river rafting on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Georgie--adventurer, raconteur, eccentric--started by swimming the rapids in the river, and continued running large commercial trips into her 80's in the 1990's.

You may be as surprised by this book as I was - I bought it thinking that I OUGHT to read it to learn more about a river-running legend, but I didn't expect to enjoy it all that much. I was wrong. Author Richard Westwood engagingly tells the story of Georgie White Clark and how she came to be one of the most celebrated pioneers of Western United State river-running, especially on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In surprising detail (including the names of many of her passengers and boatmen) this book describes the trips, travails, and triumphs of Georgie's long career here in the United State and elsewhere. The book gives brief details of Georgie's early years, but focuses on her river-running years starting in 1945 when she and Harry Aleson swam from Diamond Creek to Lake Mead, through 1992 when she died.

To the author's credit he does not dodge the controversies that have marred Georgie's legend. Westwood frankly acknowledges and, in some instances, documents the validity of some of the criticisms leveled at Georgie over the years. He states what he knows or what his considerable research revealed, and leaves the conclusions up to the reader.

Through this book you will get an unvarnished portrait of a unique individual, someone who left her imprint on a sport that largely didn't exist when she started and was a multi-million dollar industry when she died. You'll learn about an incredibly complex person: alternately engaging or aloof, compassionate or driven -- but always a pioneer. This very readable book includes over 50 photographs and maps that bring to life much of what is written, and give the reader a glimpse of Georgie's world.

Almost thirty years ago I had the pleasure of reading the excellent biography of my great-great grandfather: John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat by Juanita Brooks. At the time I was sill a member of the LDS Church and when I finished the book, I got down on my knees in tears and thanked God for my grandpa and my heritage.

It has now been over twenty years since I left the Mormon Church, by my own choice, and when I finished reading Grandpa's last words at the end of this book, I had the same reaction. There is much to admire about the man and I still feel great love and affection for him, though he died almost eighty years before I was born.

The changes in my own life have definitely impacted what I took away from the two books that cover much of the same subject. The story that is most vivid from the first book was when one of his sons approached Grandpa and told him he was in love with one of Grandpa's wives. The wife was much younger than Grandpa. She had been orphaned when both of her parents died of sickness en route to Utah by wagon train. For the sake of expediency, it was decided to marry her to someone who would then take care of her. Grandpa was the man, although I think the girl was only twelve or thirteen at the time.

Grandpa never had sexual relations with her because of the circumstances of their marriage, but he hoped that one day, when she was older, she would want him. Instead, as she matured, she fell in love with one of his sons, who was much closer to her in age. Now some guys might have been very angry, but Grandpa went to Brigham Young and told him the facts. Young annulled the marriage and Grandpa was permitted to perform the marriage of his son to his now-ex-wife. This story tells a lot about the kind of man, husband, and father that my grandfather was.

When I was a child, I heard many of the oral "family" legends about Grandpa that had been handed down from generation to generation. One was that Grandpa was so trustworthy that he was allowed to leave prison on just his word, while he was awaiting his trial for his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. While that's not precisely true, the facts are just as compelling.

John D. Lee was allowed to leave the prison to go visit his wives and children, but only after a $15,000 bond was posted by a friend. Once he was out, many of his friends encouraged him to run from the jurisdiction to safety, as many other participants in the Massacre had done. Grandpa would not do this; first, because he had given his word and second, because he believed he had done nothing intentionally wrong (he believed he had obeyed orders from a superior officer during a time of war).

Unfortunately for Grandpa, he realized too late that responsibility for personal choices, even under military orders, comes with a price. After two trials (the first trial resulted in a hung jury) Grandpa was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to die by firing squad. His punishment for the Mountain Meadows Massacre was part of the price that had to be paid for Utah statehood (the other part was the renunciation of polygamy by the LDS Church, but that didn't happen until several years later).

I did find it interesting that although Grandpa remained true to the Mormon Church and Joseph Smith, he was convinced that Brigham Young, his adopted father and president of the church, was a false prophet and a usurper and he denounced him as such. He states that at the death of Joseph Smith it was common knowledge among the "saints" that Smith's son was to take over the leadership of the church when he was of age. By the time that happened, Young had solidified his grip on the church and no one dared oppose him.

Knowing this, I wonder why so many in the Lee family would remain members of the Mormon Church. I suppose that if you lived in Utah in 1877, there were not a lot of options. Of course those of us who came along later didn't know about this and if we did, it didn't matter because we had our own "testimony" of the church.

Though the book is over 400 pages, I read most of it in two sittings. It was fascinating to "hear" Grandpa tell his story in his own words.

This book covers the events of the infamous Mountain Meadows massacre concisely as the memory of John D. Lee permits. Although it doesn't carry such an alluring title as "Mormonism Unveiled," it carries much more about the man himself in conjunction with the dreaded events of 1857. It carries no extra input to solidify the case either for or against the church as a whole. If it's history you're after, and not manufactured melodrama, then this is a great read.

I find this will be a great help in getting around the Family History Library as this is my first trip there. Knowing where things are and how to prepare will help me take full advantage of my limited time there. Having been told knowing what you want and where in the Library it is, will save me much time and effort, this book doest just that for me.

I read this book the week before I arrived for my first visit to the FHL. It was very useful to me. I did what they suggested and purchased the FHL Library catalog on CD (did not know that was available before) and searched in my hotel room for potentially useful items when the library was closed. I was then able to go straight to those items the next day. A good descripton of the surrounding area too. I know they can't cover it all, but I would like to see them add a little something on what there is to do with young children in the area. My husband had to entertain the children while I was doing my research.

A very well intentioned book with one main problem Krakauer can never decide where exactly to place the Lafferty Murders in the narrative therefore whatever issue about the nature of Mormonism is being discussed is always cut short and refocused to some kind of vague tie in that relates to these gruesome murders at least in the mind of the author.

So the narrative will be clipping along and you will be very interested in a particular aspect the Golden Plates, The Sons of Ham, plural marriage or the fact that in spite of the LDS's claim to the contrary there have always been competing factions within Mormonism and all of the sudden you will be back on the murders with no idea of how exactly the author bought you to that point. This is at times tragic because while it is a very well researched book at times its subject matter was so broad it felt like it was two or three books in one. This leads on my part to both feelings of confusion and a desire to hear more.

Asserting that America's "homegrown religion" is one steeped in and ultimately defined by persecution and violence, Krakauer's extensively researched book about Mormon fundamentalism is an informative look at an aspect of life that people are not always willing to see. Centering around a double murder in 1984, Krakauer deftly blends the beginnings of Mormonism, and the eventual splitting of the religion into Mainstream Mormonism and FLDS (the fundamentalist sect) with character portraits of those affected by the faith. The threads all merge into an outstanding picture that is not even close to boring - the entire narrative is endlessly interesting, and no one chapter brings down the whole. Each compliments the other and the flow is brilliant. Some may be bothered by the noticeable slant the author takes, but otherwise the tome that winningly combines the thriller with the non-fiction genres raises essential ethical and moral questions that every person should at least ponder - even if they themselves cannot answer them.

This is a story of extremism. Two Fundamentalist Mormons murder their sister-in-law and her two-year old child for her bad influence on their brother. Extreme, right? Yes. But the importance and genius of this book is how Krakauer connects extremism to its foundation - mainstream Mormonism. His reporting of the Mormon culture was spot on, in fact, so precise and accurate that many mainstream members resented the intrusion. He got it absolutely right and made the connection with extreme behavior undeniable. Well done, Krakauer.

i've read a couple of krakauer's books (into thin air, into the wild), and have mostly loved them. i say "mostly", because, while i think he's a great writer and storyteller, and meticulous in his research, there's occasionally a hint of arrogance or smugness that i don't find appealing. that said, i found under the banner of heaven to be exceptionally fascinating.

if you're not familiar with krakauer's work, his books all have the same general approach: he tells a particular story, but places it within the context of its larger setting. in this case, the particular story is of a double murder, carried out by two fundamentalist mormon brothers (of their sister-in-law and her daughter) based on an alleged prophetic message from god. but the larger context is a thorough history of mainstream mormonism, and a much more detailed history and current-day description of the various fundamentalist mormon sects that have split off from the main lds faith.

of course, this book was published before the news-swirl earlier this year of the raid on a polygamous fundie compound in texas, and all the fall-out from that; but those characters play into this book (specifically, warren jeffs, the de facto leader of the particular splinter group that raided compound rolled up to). i learned a lot about mormonism, and even more about fundamentalist mormons (who, i have to add, krakauer treats with as much empathy and fairness as is possible).

all that said: what was really intriguing to me were the broader questions the book occasionally asks, but were regularly percolating in my mind, about religion. questions about civil disobedience, and how to respond when one's faith and government are at odds with each other. questions about hearing the voice of god. questions about authoritarian structures and communal discernment. even questions about marriage, fidelity, and intimacy. at one point, i jokingly said to my wife, "hey, maybe we should consider polygamy." she was at a particularly weary moment, and quickly responded, "could the other wife do all the cooking and cleaning?"

at the bottom line, under the banner of heaven bubbles up the danger of any one person saying he or she is speaking for god.

There are far better and longer reviews than mine posted here, so I hesitated to even attempt one. However, I've traveled to many of the places described in Jon's book, including Separation Canyon (within the Grand Canyon) and Colorado City, long before the Fundamentalist LDS Church became one of the latest media targets.

Jon's book is very well researched, with first-person accounts, interviews, old letters and many other sources neatly pulled together. He had no intention of this book "bashing" the Mormon church, but the story he tells reveals much about the church, both good and bad.

Jon has a habit of telling stories that need to be told. Here he does his usual good job of doing just that- giving the 21st-century reader a clearer understanding about why Joseph Smith and his followers were hated, why America went to war against the Mormon church and why that same church today continues to be at odds with the rest of America and the world.

The book provided me with many "aha" moments- from the fate of John Wesley Powell's three men who left the expedition and who were "murdered" by Indians while in Mormon country to the reality of Elizabeth Smart's abduction and restoration.

A non-LDS friend recommended this to me, saying it seemed very authentic and realistic in its portrayal of Mormonism. It was completely ridiculous. She got nearly everything about Mormons, and Utah, completely wrong. It was like she asked a few questions, didn't really understand what she was being told, and made up her own drivel to fill in the holes. It was painfully obvious that no LDS member read that novel at ANY stage until after it was already published, or they would have corrected her on nearly everything related to the Church. She blatantly didn't know what she was talking about. There was nothing even remotely accurate in that book.

If foreshadowing was a snake, you'd be dead by Chapter 2. Really dull. Really disappointing.

I started reading this book because our book club is going to review it. I was disappointed from about page one. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ( pretty liberal member ), and I was very offended by the fact that the author did not have one single fact straight regarding the Mormon religion, which is central to this story. Some of her facts about our church are aggregiously inaccurate and knowing that people all over the country are reading these gross misrepresentations about our culture and religion is most frustrating. As for the story, I have never had to grieve over something so heinous as this murder, but I have a friend who has, and it seemed the dysfunctionality of this family went on and on and on. The characters were not fleshed out very well and nothing held me to this book. Once I got online and read over more of the reviews, I could easily figure out the ending, so spared myself the waste of time of finishing the last 1/3 of the book. On to better literature. Mary Silver, Farmington, Utah

I hated this book. I rarely won't finish a book--even a bad one--but this one was awful. Not the plot--a young girl seeks revenge for the murder of her two little sisters--but the authors lack of knowledge on the family's religion sent me through the roof. If you are going to write about a group of people--DO SOME RESEARCH! She had so many wrong statements about Mormons it was pathetic. There isn't a temple in Cedar City, Mormons would not call the Salt Lake Temple the "big" temple, girls wear their wedding dresses when they are married, fathers don't give a father's blessing ever night and morning--they have family prayer, jell-o is such a cliché, and a return missionary is called an RM not a MSS. The list of her discrepancies goes on and on. I kept reading hoping that she would get past the religion thing and get on with the story but I gave up after 100 or so pages. I am still very annoyed, displeased, irritated, etc... by the author.

If the rating system was based on tears I cried while reading this novel, I would have to give it a thousand stars....

This is the first book I have read by Ms. Mitchard, and I was captivated from the first paragraph; as one reviewer observed, this book practically begs to be read. It is a story of redemption, vengeance, questioning one's belief system, forgiveness, love, hate, life, death and the choices we make. It is told from the perspective of Ronnie, a teenage Mormon girl who happened to witness the brutal murder of her two beloved younger sisters at the age of twelve. Interestingly, this horific act truly takes a back seat to the stories of the family itself - the lives of the people who were taken and those who survived. While we do learn about the killer and his life, the novel focuses more on the lives of those who are affected by his crimes. This is quite the antithesis of the way the media presents a story; if this happened in real life, the public would know every conceivable detail about the life of the killer, and have little or no information about the family who was so deeply and irrevocably affected by the crime.

This story is deeply moving and emotional (I cried a lot, which was quite embarrassing while reading in public); however it is not a "depressing" story; rather, it is touching and uplifiting. It restores one's faith in humanity, so to speak.

I recommend it highly, think it makes a great discussion piece, and am looking forward to reading more of this author's works.

An exhasperatingly detailed book that only chronicles the end of Gary Gilmore's life. Does not delve into his childhood or family history. Goes into great detail on things that are of little interest and importance to the overall story. Reads more like a textbook than a biography.

Norman Mailer's book "The Executioner's Song" made me a fan of journalistic fiction. He was capable of using elements from a journalist's world while incorporating the necessary elements to turn this epic project into a beautiful, insightful novel. This combination he used to perfection as he was able to tell the story of Gary Gilmore, the first man to face the death sentence since its reinstatement.

The book is logically constructed focusing on Gary Gilmore and his life in the beginning while slowly shifting towards others with the ominous day of his execution approaching. It centers on his relationships made before the crime and after while always seemingly keeping an un-biased stance. What Mailer does such a good job of doing while constructing this narrative is incorporating all the other characters involved in Gary Gilmore; it was about his family, media, law enforcement, the Supreme Court, ACLU, and other agencies. The second half of this book is dictated by these people and organizations trying to be apart of Gary's life and the decision that will either keep him alive or kill him.

The most interesting aspect of the novel is that Gary Gilmore wanted to be executed. He continuously tells Utah to carry out what they sentenced and stop putting of his execution date. This is quite a twist that makes Gilmore even more of an interesting character. The events of his life seem to have captured the whole country and he couldn't care less about them getting involved and pleads to be killed

This novel is the true definition of an epic; it has a large scope that encapsulates probably everything that surrounded these events. It is a testament to Mailer's ability to research and construct such a powerful narrative to tell such a harrowing story.

Book arrived in a timely manner in perfect condition. On this transaction, at least, the seller was first rate.

It just starts - no throat-clearing, no overture, no vamping-until-ready. Coming from a writer who had made his reputation slamming doors and banging about the house, leaving the television on in one sentence while simultaneously yelling abuse at the radio and bashing out power chords in another, this was of course a surprise. Also a relief and a delight. The flatness and tight-lipped quiet of The Executioner's Song after several decades of Mailer's attention-grabbing real-life excursions (stabbing a wife, running for New York mayor) and delinquent (now sliding into seniloquent) hellclub ravings is what made it so disarming, then very quickly riveting.

The simple declarative sentence, hosed clean of beardy metaphors, adverbial and adjectival excess, of discursive detail and baroque, often bonkers, "existential" riffing, is something that Mailer had always seemed congenitally incapable of writing.

His friend, the critic Richard Poirier, once hazarded a guess that the purpose behind Mailer's stylistic "self-pleasuring" was to excite the reader to some pitch of consciousness equivalent to Mailer's own. As a young man, Mailer had famously said that he would settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of his time. As a result, it had been all but impossible to have a peaceful or casual relationship to his writing. Even after the most obedient attention, the reader was seldom rewarded with any sense of achieved calm. "Mailer is a writer as yet without the ultimate serenity that is probably needed for the great book he wishes to write", Poirier concluded in 1972. "When, oh when, will all the kids grow up, all the wives remarry?" Martin Amis was still wondering a decade later, shaking his head sadly over the latest Mailer-on-Marilyn money-spinner, Of Women and Their Elegance (1981).

In fact, The Executioner's Song had been published in 1979. And it was apparent from the opening paragraph - even of pulse, unblinking, unworried - that here Mailer was trying something new: "Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree. She climbed to the top and the limb with the good apples broke off. Gary caught her as the branch came scraping down. They were scared. The apple trees were their grandmother's best crop and it was forbidden to climb in the orchard. She helped him drag away the tree limb and they hoped no one would notice. That was Brenda's earliest recollection of Gary."

"Gary" is the career criminal and soon-to-be-double-murderer Gary Gilmore - a "bad apple" if ever there was one. "Brenda" is his cousin - his "favourite coz" - who he was there to catch when she fell and is there for him now nearly 30 years later, happy to take Gary in and give him another chance in the security of her God-fearing Mormon family after a lifetime in reform school and jail. And for 1,050 pages, that - the reminder that good apples sometimes turn rotten, the idea that human agency can cushion and sometimes avert catastrophe, Brenda's innocent tumble flagging Gary's grim descent into the gutter - is about as overtly literary, or as metaphorical, as it gets. Nothing writerly happens until a sudden efflorescence on page 14 - a piece of poetic interior monologue, Mailer transposing what he believes is going on inside Brenda's head: "Brenda felt as if she could pick up the quiver in each bright colour that Gary was studying on the jukebox. He looked close to being dazzled by the revolving red, blue and gold light show on the electronic screen of the cigarette console. He was so involved it drew her into his mood."

The ending of The Executioner's Song, of course, is never in doubt: the death sentence passed on Gilmore, and his insistence on facing execution by firing squad, making him the first person to be executed in the United States in a decade, had been headline news around the world (and a punk rock record) only two years before the book came out. On its publication in 1979, conventional narrative tension - what will happen? how will it end? - was necessarily replaced by an altogether different kind of suspense: how would Mailer take this warmed-over material, so recently the subject of television specials and fish-wrap journalism, and make it new again? And more: how long could he go before his old habits of embarrassing grandiloquence and associative rambling, his increasingly unchecked tendency to put "Norman Mailer" at the heart of whatever he was writing, how long before "the slumbering Beast" rose up to reinhabit him and scupper the enterprise?

At the time, the omens didn't look all that promising. A few weeks before The Executioner's Song appeared, Mailer persuaded his publishers to repackage it as a novel, or rather a "true life novel", along the lines of Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood. And out of the violent mess of the Gilmore story emerged all-too-familiar Mailer tropes. There was the widely-reported fact that Gilmore had elected to die so he could save his soul, for example, and be reincarnated. And then there was the killer's concurrence with one of Norman Mailer's most frequently recurring ideas: that death is an experience of life, "perhaps the final orgasm into the future". At the time these were real concerns that made turning the pages of The Executioner's Song a white-knuckle experience.
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I remember Mailer once saying that the best way to come across well on television - to remain looking halfway human, that is, in conditions designed to make the scalp boil and the ear-lobes burn and the ego sit up and demand feeding - was to cultivate an air of total, dead-eyed boredom. "Ideally, it was best to feel no more desire than a prostitute toward the 10th client of the night".

In the 25 years since The Executioner's Song was published, Mailer has consistently tried to frame the writing of the book in similar terms, and relegate it to the second division of his work, the first division of course consisting of his volumes of "real" fiction. His sensitivity on this subject is clear in an exchange which took place between Mailer and the high-brahmin American poet Robert Lowell, a fellow-demonstrator on the 1967 anti-Vietnam war march on the Pentagon, which Mailer wrote up in Armies of the Night (1968), his first extended work of non-fiction. Lowell: "I really think you are the best journalist in America." Mailer: "Well ... there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America." Journalism for Mailer has always been a kind of literary photography, and unbecoming to the serious writer's artistic dignity. "I think The Executioner's Song, more than any book I've ever done, was an exercise in craft", Mailer has said. "I've never felt close to it".

I don't think I had heard of Raymond Carver 25 years ago when I read The Executioner's Song for the first time. (The Stories of Raymond Carver, his first collection, wasn't published in Britain until 1985). And no writer could be further distanced temperamentally, or in tone and style, from Mailer. "Yes, well, I guess they would like Raymond Carver in England", Mailer commented dismissively when I interviewed him some years ago. Carver's reputation as a minimalist (a term he hated) presented an alternative to the lusty, maximal ambitions which Mailer had always maintained were necessary to tame "The Great Bitch", as he describes the American novel in Cannibals and Christians.

And yet, rereading it now, it's Carver that The Executioner's Song irresistibly suggests, at the sentence level. Carver's ear for ordinary, defeated, working-class speech was unerrring; his immersion in the "applauseless" lives of his factory workers and cosmetics salesladies and motel managers, total. "Nothing vague or blurred, no smoked-glass prose", was Carver's prescription. And in his commitment to common language, the language of normal discourse, he was following an American tradition established by Robert Frost and, before Frost, by William Carlos Williams, the poet of inarticulate America - a poet who distrusted articulacy. "The speech of Polish mothers" was where Williams insisted he got his English from. His famous "flatness" came from the urban "work-yard" of New Jersey. But it was a strain in American writing that had always been antithetical to Mailer.

Language was the chariot Mailer rode in on; it was the weapon with which he was still intent on nailing the Great Bitch and smiting the heathen. He had to suspend work on Ancient Evenings, a big, windy, (over-) ambitious novel about serial reincarnation, set in the Egypt of 1130BC, in order to write The Executioner's Song. And the flat, blank voices of the American Midwest, the voices of the people who were related to Gary Gilmore, or whose lives were otherwise rent by being dragged into Gilmore's orbit, seem to assume an added poignancy or sense of desolation by being transcribed by a writer for whom their very flatness and blankness - positive qualities for Carver and other Dirty Realists - represents a kind of dusty-throated deprivation.

Like Oswald's Tale (1995), Mailer's compelling account of President Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, which was also "produced" by the media hustler and long-time Mailer collaborator, Larry Schiller, The Executioner's Song is divided into two parts of equal length. The first, "Western Voices", is a direct rendering of the murder story from the day in April 1976 when Gary Gilmore was released from the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, until the morning nine months later when he was executed by having four shots fired into his heart at the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, Utah. Truman Capote would later claim that Mailer had ripped off the techniques he pioneered in In Cold Blood 15 years earlier - "I do something truly innovative, and who gets the prizes? Norman Mailer!" - and he had a point: Mailer's prose is plainer-dealing, leaner, rougher-edged, but the "saturation reporting" method based on police reports, trial transcripts, tape-recorded interviews with friends and family and so on, is essentially the same.

Mailer's genius in "Eastern Voices", the second part of The Executioner's Song, is to blow apart the mystique Capote cultivated as to how it's all done. In part one Mailer wants the reader to be amazed because the density of detail and the deeply intimate nature of much that is revealed (particularly in the relationship between Gilmore and his teenage girlfriend, Nicole Barrett) seems impossible. In part two he wants the reader to be amazed again because it looks so easy. He wants the reader to be amazed twice.

By 1979, the differences between the conventional practices of straight news reporting and the so-called New Journalism of Capote, Mailer, Tom Wolfe and others were well established. The newspaper reporter wrote to a for mula. He tried to fashion a clear, concise, straight news story, starting with the who, what, when, where and why of an event and proceeding toward the end by placing factual details in descending order of interest and importance - a device that ennabled readers to grasp the essentials immediately and editors to cut stories from the bottom up. His job was to try to hold a mirror up to an event and show its surface. There was zero interpretation. The Capotes and Wolfes, on the other hand, enjoyed the luxury of time: they could hang around until people had forgotten they were there, then creep up on reality with its pants around its ankles. The New Journalist could build up scenes and develop characters; they could even give the sense of being inside a character's consciousness. They could write non-fiction "like a novel".

That much was known, if still contested. What remained unknown and decidedly murky were the often sleazy details of the chequebook journalism and ruthless wheeler-dealing that went into securing exclusives and buying up stories. The naked horse-trading, in other words, that allowed the writers to cosy up to their subjects, drain them dry and then show a clean pair of heels. Enter Larry Schiller.

Part of Truman Capote's beef against Mailer was that, whereas he, Capote, had spent six months interrogating "his" killers, keeping them sweet with comic books and cookies, Mailer hadn't so much as been in the same execution chamber as Gary Gilmore. What Capote failed to take into account was that Mailer had a surrogate - an aide-de-camp and amanuensis - in Larry Schiller. Known as "the journalist who dealt in death" because of the way he had bought his way into stories on people such as Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby, and the Manson family, Schiller is the kind of behemoth character - still fairly freakish then, much less exotic now - who could only exist in the novels of Dickens and the corporate hospitality facilities of late-20th-century America.

The eastern voices in part two of The Executioner's Song are the voices of lawyers, prosecutors, TV anchors, reporters, media monkeys ("There were going to be a lot of monkeys in that zoo"). And the loudest, most colourful and most idiosyncratic of these (as well as, in a strange way, the least deceived) is Mailer's helpmeet Larry Schiller's.

Instead of being repelled by it, as I should have been, I found, instead, that I wanted to draw closer. On January 2 1981 I was on the final pages of The Executioner's Song, which I had read at a gallop. Around tea-time it came on the television that they had arrested a man in Sheffield in connection with the Yorkshire Ripper murders. Forty-eight hours later I was in the bar of the Norfolk Gardens Hotel in Bradford listening to claim and counter-claim about who had "got his chequebook out" for Peter Sutcliffe's father or "locked up" the brother, making notes towards Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, a book for which Norman Mailer would generously volunteer a quote when it was published in America. In 1995, when I came to write Fullalove, my second novel, "Norman Miller", a tabloid hack specialising in murder, meets his near-namesake, Mailer at the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire.

A telling phrase crops up at key moments in both Oswald's Tale and The Executioner's Song. Having secured worldwide motion picture and publication rights in his true life story, including exclusive syndication on his love letters, suicide notes and family pictures, and having promised to scatter his ashes in the skies over Utah, Larry Schiller approaches Gilmore to say a final farewell before the execution: "He grasped both of Gilmore's hands ... and he said, he heard it come out of him, 'I don't know what I'm here for'"

"Why are you here, they [the KGB officers in Minsk] would ask", Mailer writes in Oswald's Tale. "What do you expect to find?" In both cases the answer is simple: material for two books that are to be counted not only among the very best that one of America's best writers has written, but can also claim a place among the most impressive books published by any American in recent years. The puzzle is why this continues to be a truth that seems self-evident to almost everybody except Norman Mailer.

Except for classical or historical novels, I admit that I am not much of a fiction reader. I picked this book up only because Norman Mailer wrote it and because he is understood to be one of America's foremost writer's of fiction. I had read a book by him about Lee Harvey Oswald and was so unimpressed that I have now forgotten its title. It was supposed to be non-fiction, but appeared to me to be anything but.

Anyway, this book was my attempt to give Mailer another chance. It is of course about the brief period of freedom and then the ignominious death by firing squad of one, Gary Mark Gilmore. Charitably, Gilmore can at best be described as the "scum of the earth," having spent most of his life in, rather than out of prison, from crimes as petty as liquor store heists, up to murder.

Whatever literary value this book is supposed to have had, in my mind at least, was lost and over-shadowed by the wanton, random, and utter senselessness and brutality of the murders he committed before he was finally recaptured and executed.

This, his last chance at freedom, was squandered like the rest of his life. Gilmore proved that he was not able to handle life on the outside because he had no idea how to go about it. Unlike his structured life inside, his life outside of prison had no rhyme or reason. What he knew how to do was to create chaos wherever he went.

During his freedom, he was like the ball in a pinball machine, randomly bouncing along a downward obstacle course of life, where he hoped to be able to ring a few bells, hit a few bright lights and make a few noises before the lights were finally turned out on him for good. It seems that the script for the ending of his life had already been written: by him at birth. His life was an existential black hole, without hope.

Somehow, Mailer tried to turn this foreordained tragedy into a love story between Gilmore and "a trailer park loser" named Nicole, but in my view it all was mostly a literary contrivance. This was not a story of hope: from the beginning, we knew there would be only a fiery ending to this saga. All that was left to do was to tie up the loose ends.

The die sending Gilmore's life on its inexorable downward trajectory had already been cast. Instead of "Mark," "tragedy" should have been Gilmore's middle name. Everything he touched turned to death and then to dust. He was, always the walking dead: A zombie brought back to life by Mailer's literary tricks.

Even when he emerged from prison, all of his lifelines, as well as his nine lives, had been used up. He stood face-to-face with the existential precipice: It was "over-the-cliff" for him, and the sooner the better. Did anyone really think that Gary Mark Gilmore was going to live out the rest of his lost freedom and life as a gas station attendant? Better to go out in a blaze of ignominious glory. Which is what he did. Hell, even I could write that story?

The only tension left for the artist to resolve was how many innocent souls would become the victim of this human wrecking ball. If it takes skill to resolve that dilemma, then leave me out. All I can see is the pain of those who died at his senseless hands. If there is art here I am glad I missed it.

One star

Having read most of the other books dealing with the Mark Hoffman affair, I was interested in this interesting approach. Indeed, there is much to be admired in this account. Although I am a faithful adherent of the LDS faith, I am willing to accept alternate interpretations of LDS church history.

Unfortunately, Worrell make too many statements about the LDS church, LDS history, and LDS temple worship which are demonstrably false, including details of a sensitive nature I'd prefer not to go into, but which careful research would have clarified. It seems he either simply skimmed material or read a schetchy account, and then with a somewhat hazy view in his mind simply made up the details in an attempt to clarify the issue.

Given these lapses, I can't help but question details in his discussion of Dickenson, Sotheby's, the Amherst community, etc.

This is unfortunate, really, as the topic of Hoffman's non-LDS materials needs further discussion; unfortuantely, I doubt the quality of work done in this book as evidenced by the mishandling of the LDS materials. A much better approach for that aspect may be found in Robert Lindsey's "A Gathering of Saints."

I found it be a terrific book, well written, flowing, and plenty of information about forgeries and past histories. If nothing else, I discovered plenty of information on Emily, her family, and the area and climate around her home. There's always been plenty of information about Mormonism, and it's to the individual ot make up his/her mind about the religious aspects. I enjoyed it and would recommend it to others.

This book goes beyond the usual anti-Mormon quasi-historical documentary/docudrama. As Mormon history is often documented despite unsure, poorly substantiated, and conflicting facts, this book is convincing based on the writer's sharp research and study of sciences such as forgery, art dealing, and the New England rural lifestyle. I could barely put it down.

This one starts out a bit slow and then speeds up with great exposition about technique, method, motive - leading to grisly murders and a bizarre central character. Dry wit style takes you into the backsludge of a flimsy industry full of fakes. A great read. It is about way more than Mormons or the literal crimes. And I think Aunt Emily is a vastly, grossly overestimated , third rate poet. From Mass, she gets itellectual praise. If she were from Nashville, people would just laugh. But the story is about human nature and greed on the base level, right in polite society. Great writing, page turner, one night read. Would be a great airplane book. Five stars in spite of the slow, polite start and the attempt to make Aunt Emily appear a worthy poet. Got it from library, read it and bought two for gifts from Amazon vendors. Not for the kids.

Simon Worral is clearly an accomplished writer and his book, The Poet and the Murderer, demonstrates that skill. It's a fascinating story about a forger who earns a good living faking historical documents, mainly those that could be important to the Mormon Church. The reader learns a great deal about how document forgery is accomplished, about how little concern the nation's major auction houses demonstrate for the validity of what they put on the block, and about the roots of Mormonism.

The only problem with the book is that the story wanders around in interesting but not necessarily riveting detail --- detail that sometimes loses sight of the story line. What was auctioned off as a poem of Emily Dickinson frames the story in an opening that zeros in on the purchaser, Daniel Lombardo, then the curator of special collections for the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, the center of Dickinson lore.

The character who turns out to be a forger and murderer, Mark Hoffman, fails to come alive in the sense one can identify with him, or pity him or even be truly appalled by him. Raised a Mormon and obsessed by the church, he is portrayed as mechanical man. If his crime had been foreshadowed in greater detail, with a more sympathetic portrayal of the victims, I think the story would have held more of my attention.

But it is wrong to be too critical of Worral's work, which is an easy read. I just wanted more. That is not a bad way to leave a reader, but it does seem that more might have been available to Worral, more of what I wanted to know about Lombardo as well as Hoffman's victims. Finally I'd like to have footnotes on Worral's detailed analysis of the early years of Mormonism, or at least some citations of his secondary sources, so I could easily follow up where my interest was stimulated by this book.

i found a reference to this in re-reading Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. Juanita Brooks' Mountain Meadows Massacre had been, for me, the bible about these doings. Bagley has gained access to additional information (eg, letters, meeting notes, etc) and fleshes out the context of the ongoing disputes (from the midwest to the west) in a thorough way, giving me a better understanding of both perspectives. It is a more "academic" book than Brooks'; I wouldn't dispense with either.

Just FYI, my interest in this is based on the decade-plus later murder of the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn* in the "wardhouse" in Toquerville, Utah, on the supposition that they were investigating the MM Massacre. I was disappointed that Bagley didn't get into this.

*the Howlands and Dunn had left the Powell expedition through the Grand Canyon.

Book is in A-1 condition; arrived earlier than expected. Has the perfect information required for a graduate history class I am taking at Western New Mexico University. Truths finally being told by historians is a welcome sight.
mitchell

I read Juanita Brooke's Mountain Meadow Massacre several years ago and decided to follow up with this book to see what if anything was different. This book actually compliments the work of Ms. Brooke's. It includes much more detail and as the author indicated does give many new insights not previously available.

It is certainly a disturbing chapter in Mormon history and certainly made me think. I highly recommend this book to any person looking for honest information regarding this incident.

I was hopeful of getting a straight story of what happened at Mountain Meadows when I read this book. My ancestor is involved. Bagley warned that if the reader came to read about the "Saints" this and the "Saints" that, then the reader would be disappointed. I was excited about reading a balanced and unbiased story. I checked it out of the public library. I did not see the biased word "Saints" but I did read a very biased book.


I am not a big conspiracy person. However, Bagley's conspiracy goes like this:

1. The much beloved Parley P. Pratt is murdered.
2. Two Mormon men see the "Arkansas" party leave.
3. They notify the Utah Mormons that the wagon train is on the way.
4. The Mormons want to take revenge for Parley P. Pratt's murder
5. The apostle Charles C. Rich (my ancestor) kicks them out of Salt Lake. He sets in motion the conspiracy and tells them not to take the route that the Donner Party took but rather to go to Mountain Meadows.
6. There Brigham Young has devised a plan to murder all in the wagon train.
7. (By all accounts) About 50 Mormon men (remember no Indians) are led by Lee, a somewhat less of a leader. These 50 men (remember no Indians) keep tough wagon train men with guns pinned down for several days. (That would be tough. I've been there. There were more trees back then.)
8. No attempt is made to cover up the crime site. (The bodies were just left)
9. A very weak story is contrived to explain how everyone in the wagon train was murdered.
10. It doesn't take long for the real story to come out.
11. Still the crime site is not cleaned up. The US Army does that later.

I am not a conspiracy person. I feel Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy.
I do not think there was a conspiracy to kill everyone in the wagon train. It is silly, nonsensical, and intellectually offensive to say that Brigham Young ordered the massacre. Such people put themselves in the same class as the Kennedy conspiracy theorists.

What made Bagley write this?

1. I think he has issues with his Mormon past. He hints of it in his writing.
2. He "does not like Brigham Young". It is probably not a good idea to write a book if you feel that way. The best Hitler books are balanced. Bagley's book is not balanced. He all but admits it.

Conclusion: Bagley blew it. He wrote an implausible book based on an unlikely conspiracy. He started out with the goal of pinning it on Brigham Young. This reveals a bias..

The conspiracy that is the foundation of his book is not supported by other unbiased historians.
A recent book, The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi, put to rest the Kennedy conspiracy. The upcoming book by Turley will hopefully put to rest the Bagley conspiracy.

The book, _Blood of the Prophets_ was unfortunately written by a 'for hire' author with an a priori conclusion that, in Will Bagley's words, would "pin it on Brigham Young". When you pour your research into an anti-Mormon polemic, it tends to be wasted taint and that's what we've gotten here.